Advertisers increasingly are utilizing the postal service and other delivery carriers to promote their products to consumers. Called "direct" mailings, the promotional materials transmitted by advertisers via the mail possess distinct advantages over those placed in other media presently available. Unlike standard television and radio ads, for example, direct mailings may be "personalized" to each recipient by including unique identifying information such as names and addresses in the bodies of the materials transmitted. Direct mailings also provide tangible means of expressing the advertiser's message which, unlike untaped television and radio ads, remain available for further review. Including "involvement devices" such as scrambled messages, scratch-off compositions, or unfoldable three-dimensional "pop-ups" in the direct mail materials additionally may increase the recipient response rate over other types of advertisements, making direct mailings an important method for promoting products and services.
Printing and collating personalized direct mail materials, however, is a difficult and burdensome task. Because the unique identifying information used to personalize the mailings may appear in multiple locations and on numerous differing inserts, failure to register the various materials may cause a particular individual to receive materials personalized for another. The differing sizes of and paper types used for the envelopes and insertable materials similarly all but preclude use of a single traditional press or multiple web, constant speed press run, as maintaining the materials in registration results in, at minimum, waste equal to the difference between the largest and smallest images multiplied by the number of images on the webs.
Moreover, in many cases direct mail materials are printed separately from any collating and inserting operations and subsequently are collated and inserted into envelopes. These multiple run processes introduce new difficulties into the overall operations-particularly if the materials are personalized-as registration of the materials must be maintained through the multiple runs. Inefficiencies frequently result as well, since the equipment may need to be reconfigured between runs to perform the necessary operations sequentially.